An Infected Splinter? A Brief Response to Kevin DeYoung
Kevin DeYoung has developed a taxonomy for addressing the splintering of the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” (YRR), “New Calvinist” movement, the quasi-cohesive group of young Christians subscribing to generally reformed theology for the last decade and a half. He explains this movement has been splintering recently, which anyone who is even loosely associated with the movement will acknowledge. (I have considered myself a part of this movement since the mid 2000s). DeYoung attributes this splintering to socio-cultural and political dynamics more so than to theological ones. I tend to agree with him on this, and I also tend to find his taxonomy generally helpful:
1. Contrite: “Look at the church’s complicity in past and present evils. We have been blind to injustice, prejudice, racism, sexism, and abuse. What the world needs is to see a church owning its sins and working, in brokenness, to make up for them and overcome them.”
2. Compassionate: “Look at the many people hurting and grieving in our midst and in the world. Now is the time to listen and learn. Now is the time to weep with those who weep. What the world needs is a church that demonstrates the love of Christ.”
3. Careful: “Look at the moral confusion and intellectual carelessness that marks our time. Let’s pay attention to our language and our definitions. What the world needs is a church that will draw upon the best of its theological tradition and lead the way in understanding the challenges of our day.”
4. Courageous: “Look at the church’s compromise with (if not outright capitulation to) the spirit of the age. Now is the time for a trumpet blast, not for backing down. What the world needs is a church that will admonish the wayward, warn against danger, and stand as a bulwark for truth, no matter how unpopular.”
Some have already argued that this taxonomy alienates or ignores other historic forms of Christian faith (namely, the black church) and that it valorizes toxic forms of Christian faith (namely, white supremacy) by calling such a group “courageous.”
As a pastor and theologian, I have been engaging the issue of race personally, pastorally, and also academically for a decade-plus. I pastored a majority black church in a majority black neighborhood for nearly nine years, and I recently finished a dissertation in multiethnic ecclesiology, arguing that the multiethnic church displays the life of the triune God a la John 17:21–23.
As I said, I find DeYoung’s taxonomy helpful, insofar as it addresses the splintering of the YRR movmement itself. He accurately represents me, at least — I’m probably a “Compassionate/2” in his grouping, whose primary impulse is to listen to and lament the pain of black and minority brothers and sister, who thinks systemic racism is real, that we can eat the meat and spit out the bones of certain secular theories, and that lowercase “black lives matter” should be a self-evident Christian principle, even if the “organization” “Black Lives Matter” is not one with which Christians can or should align (see DeYoung’s chart below).
I won’t here respond to his taxonomy in relation to politics and gender, because I’m more out of my depth there, because my points largely pertain to the issue as a whole, and because I believe many problems in our cultural moment can be traced to our cultural history of thumbing our nose at the doctrine of the image of God in humanity in order to justify chattel slavery and Jim Crow racism.
DeYoung notes the friction at the edges of the spectrum, between extreme 1s and extreme 4s, which I think is right. And while he willingly says this is an opening rather than a closing word on the issue and that it is a heuristic or shorthand rather than a hard-and-fast segmenting of groups, I believe he misses the asymmetrical relationship between the two ends of the spectrum. He doesn’t probe the “why?” question with sufficient depth: Why would someone become a more “radical” 1 or 4? I don’t believe that question generates generally morally equivalent answers. In other words, from my view, more 1s tend to be those who have experienced personal and historic marginalization, while more 4s tend historically to represent groups which have had more cultural power and feel the threat of loss of that power. I tend to think that more 1s have a righteously legitimate point and fewer 4s do. I believe more cultural majority members (“white” people) of the “New Calvinist” crowd (I am one!) are more in danger of giving quarter to invisible (or visible!) racist or racialized forces than they are of moving toward a radical denial of Christian truth. Again, I’m speaking in general terms, and I’m not denying a danger from the left flank of the preferred prounouns mindset, which is real and dangerous.
About these extremes, DeYoung notes:
The loudest voices tend to be 1s and 4s, which makes sense because they tend to see many of these issues in the starkest terms and often collide with each other in ways that makes a lot of online noise. The 1s and 4s can also be the most separatist, with some voices (among the 1s) encouraging an exodus from white evangelical spaces and some voices (among the 4s) encouraging the woke to be excommunicated.
Here, again, I think DeYoung wrongly equalizes the moral grounds of the problem: while some (not all or even most) 1s may provide cover for crazy leftist stuff, more 4s provide cover for wicked right-wing white supremacy, which has, historically, a more insidious and dangerous role in our cultural life. More 4s have doing the marginalizing while more 1s have felt (or been) more marginalized. More 4s have done more pushing, to the point that 1s have quietly (or loudly) announced their new evangelical exodus.
Now some might say that some 1s tend to overplay the nature of their pain and totalize hurt feelings by calling it trauma. I’m hesitant to land there, but I understand why someone might. That said, I have found pastorally and personally that its dangerous to dismiss or denounce pain and problems we have not experienced and don’t understand. In other words, I tend to think the pain of our minority brothers and sisters is more real and therefore more morally urgent than the cultural threats perceived by those on the right flank of the culture war.
This little reflection has probably not satisfied anyone (maybe me least of all!), but I intend to enter what DeYoung himself has offered as the need for conversation. I’m an Augustinian, so my faith constantly seeks understanding. As DeYoung says:
But if we can understand what’s going on — in our networks, in our churches, and in our hearts — we will be better equipped to disciple our own people and reach out, where we can, to those who may disagree.
May God reveal his glory in our churches and his Church as he sees fit. And may we all be a part of the solution, not part of the problem.
